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Cultural Melancholy As Represented in Orhan Pamuk's White Castle

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Cultural Melancholy As Represented in Orhan Pamuk's White Castle Nehal Mohamed Abdelwahab ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Cultural Melancholy as represented in Orhan Pamuk’s White Castle Nehal Mohamed Abdelwahab Ain Shams University [email protected] Prof. Magda Hasabelnaby Prof. Shokry Megahed Faculty of Women-Ain Shams University Faculty of Education-Ain Shams University Abstract This research paper is meant to explore the use of melancholy as an explanatory model to understand the individual and the collective psyche in dealing with the historical and cultural dilemmas. It will further explore individual and collective melancholy and their effects, whether destructive or constructive within Orhan Pamuk‟s novel The White Castle, belonging to the modern Turkish literature. Keywords: Melancholy, Pamuk, Turkish Literature, Freud, Ottoman Empire “My melancholy is the most faithful mistress I have known, what wonder, then, that I love her in return” (Kierkegaard 44) This research paper is meant to use melancholy as an explanatory model to understand the individual and the collective psyche in dealing with the historical and cultural dilemmas. It will further explore individual and collective melancholy and their effects, whether destructive or constructive within Orhan Pamuk‟s novel The White Castle, belonging to the modern Turkish literature. Throughout history, the concept of „Melancholia‟ has been the subject of diverse analytical efforts. The origin of the term “Melancholy” goes back to the ancient Greek times. Melan Khole is the Greek word for “Black Bile”, a body fluid thought to affect mental and physical health (Hippocrates 460-370 BC). Melancholy was considered then as a form of mental illness caused by a bio-functional problem. A person who has an excess of black bile was described as melancholic. Around 350 BC, Aristotle‟s Problemata XXX.1 presented the melancholic as capable of greatness: “the humour of heroes and great men”. Later, Plato (424-347 BC) linked melancholy with “frenzy, through which ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Journal of Scientific Research in Arts 9 (2019) - 68 - Cultural Melancholy as represented in Orhan Pamuk’s White Castle ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ divine inspiration could be achieved” (Marin 1). Aristotle‟s and Plato‟s definitions associate melancholy with creativity and giftedness. It was Galen (AD 129-200) who developed Aristotle‟s concept into the “Theory of Four Temperaments” (Stelmack and Stalikas 255). Galen linked anxiety and depression to black bile. The melancholic within Galen‟s theory is described as serious, suspicious, susceptible to depression and moodiness, not sociable, preoccupied with tragedy and cruelty of the world, and full of sympathy for others‟ suffering (258-260). Melancholy continued to be considered as a mental illness or as evil in the Medieval times until the fifteenth century when Marsilio Ficino, father of Renaissance Neo-Platonism, introduced the concept of melancholy “as a gift and a medium through which man was brought nearer to the divine” (Marin 1), bringing Aristotle‟s and Plato‟s definitions to life. In his Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), Robert Burton introduced different kinds of love that cause melancholy when immoderate or excessive. Love, for Burton, is “a species of melancholy” (8). He used the term “love- melancholy” to describe the confusion, pain and torture of a love-sick person (28). Burton crossed the medical boundaries to position melancholy in the social context. It was only at the beginning of the twentieth century when the concept of melancholy started to gain new dimensions. In an essay titled Mourning and Melancholia (1917), Sigmund Freud defines melancholia as one‟s reaction to the loss of a valued beloved object. The lost object continues to exist in the unconsciousness and the melancholic person shows lack of interest in the outside world with a loss in his self-regard and ego (243-244). Melancholy for Freud is “the reaction to the loss of a loved person, or to the loss of some abstraction which has taken the place of one, such as one's country, liberty, an ideal, and so on” (243). He argues that the melancholic might be aware of the loss but cannot perceive what has been lost inside him (245). Freud highlights the difference between melancholy and mourning. In melancholy, the lost object continues to exist in the patient‟s unconsciousness in contradiction to mourning, which makes the latter easily recoverable with time (244). According to Freud, “mourning” is the successful integration of loss into consciousness. In “melancholia,” Freud maintains, a loss that is unmourned and barred from recognition is displaced discretely onto the subject‟s ego, enacting an unconscionable loss of self. Mourning is considered healthy because “we rest assured that after a lapse of time it will be overcome” (Mourning and Melancholia 240). ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Journal of Scientific Research in Arts 9 (2019) - 69 - Nehal Mohamed Abdelwahab ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ The lowered self-regard and the loss in ego are suggested by Freud as part of the melancholic process. According to Freud: “The melancholic displays … an extraordinary diminution in his self-regard, an impoverishment of his ego on a grand scale” (Mourning and Melancholia 245). Freud‟s description of melancholia pointed out, as mentioned earlier, that it is not the world which has become poor and empty. It is the ego who has been invaded by this gloomy emptiness. The gravity of the loss is directly related to the likelihood of developing a melancholic state. Not every person would mechanically turn into melancholic in response to a loss however traumatic. The more the person is attached to the lost object, the more likely he will sink into melancholy. The melancholic attachment to the lost object supersedes any need to recover from the loss. Hence, melancholia turns into a persistent state motivated by a desire to melancholize. The initiation of the melancholic process depends also on one‟s susceptibility to melancholy. Galen‟s theory describes the melancholic personality as preoccupied with tragedy and cruelty of the world, and full of sympathy for others. Only a person with melancholic traits of personality experiences the public suffering as a source of great worry or stress. Another important melancholic trait of personality is seeking perfection. This trait is related to the early definitions of melancholy brought by Aristotle and Plato who linked melancholy to creativity. Melancholy, for them, is the gloom brought by intellectual talent. The melancholic gets to know he is not perfect, neither is the world. This is represented within the melancholic process by the gradual loss in one‟s ego that the process generates. Hence, seeking perfection seems to be a normal defensive reaction to compensate the loss in ego. Therefore, a melancholic person turns eager to learn and to understand. He also becomes over analytical of the world around him. Once the perfect settings for the initiation of the melancholic process are there, melancholic reactions and influences take place. The melancholic attachment to the lost object usually triggers a need to blame someone for the loss. The act of blaming oneself or the others for unpleasant happenings is not restricted to melancholy. Still, it is an inevitable outcome of melancholy which justifies other aspects of melancholy such as lowered self-regard and withdrawal tendencies. As noted above, the melancholic is a perfectionist who seeks high standards which sometimes are not realistic. When these standards are not met, the melancholic gets distressed. Therefore, he tends to be critical. ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Journal of Scientific Research in Arts 9 (2019) - 70 - Cultural Melancholy as represented in Orhan Pamuk’s White Castle ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ This need-to-blame acts in two directions, externally and internally. In other words, the melancholic usually blames the others and himself for the loss. Blaming others involves embarking on a quest to explore the possible reasons behind the loss: an action which is related to the over-analytical melancholic trait of personality. On the other hand, blaming one-self is related to the melancholic person‟s awareness of his own weakness. The melancholic spends his days waiting for punishment for the fact of loss. For him, the loss is so big that it
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